Admittedly, it was not the most gracious question, but it had to be asked.

Paul Tarnopol, the amateur auteur behind the new comedy-horror flick "Jersey Shore Massacre," pauses a moment, then responds with a variation of the question, "How do you ask the director if the film is so bad, it's good?"

Because I've seen the trailer?

Tarnopol quickly drops any pretense at offense. "You don't write a script called 'Jersey Shore Massacre' and expect to be looking around for air fare and hotels for the Oscars," he says good-naturedly. "It's a low-budget horror comedy. Do the math from there."

The film, a send-up of the hard-partying, hard-tanning 20somethings made famous by MTV and shot in pre-Hurricane Sandy Ortley Beach, just north of Seaside Heights, as well Weretown, Sparta and other spots, premieres tonight in New York City.

Tarnopol, a Miami-based music executive who just produced another horror spoof, "Girls Gone Dead," began developing the movie a few years ago, when GTL and "getting it in" were still siren calls.

"I was just astounded that 10 million people watched the premiere episode that season," he says. "When I saw how many female fans they had, and saw how many people hated these 'Jersey Shore' kids ... We had to do a movie like this." While "Jersey Shore" spawned a porn parody while still in its prime, Tarnopol felt there was enough "Jersey Shore" rage for a slasher scenario a couple of years later.

But despite the movie's various stabbings, hackings, strangulations and deaths-by-tanning booth — Tarnopol says the movie came within a hair's breadth of getting the dreaded NC-17 rating — he says he didn't want it to be "mean-spirited."

"Long before 'Jersey Shore,'" he says, "there were always kids like that, who were loud and wild ... People love 'Jersey Shore' because they're so who they are, they don't apologize for it."

Tarnopol wrote the script after reading a screenwriting book and watching an entire weekend of "Jersey Shore," and partnered with original "Jersey Shore" It Girl Jenni "JWoww" Farley after meeting through a mutual friend in the — what else? — Seaside Heights T-shirt business. Farley, a former nightclub promoter, executive-produced the movie and helped bring it to theaters.

It stars newcomer Danielle Dallacco — in true "Jersey Shore" fashion, Dallacco is actually from New York — as head guidette Teresa.

"She had the right look, she had the right vulnerability," Tarnopol says. Vulnerability to what? Cheap alcohol and oiled men one evolutionary step behind a Neanderthal?

"Out of all the characters, she is the one character that's a little more sensitive, a little more considerate than the rest," he says. "She just seemed to come across as a decent girl."

So unlike in reality television, the decent girl will probably survive.